Once again, a thank you to all who reviewed and pm'd me with gentle prods and encouragement. Love you chaps!
Thanks to Willwork4dean for her sound beta work.
Convincing the World He Didn't Exist
Chapter 6
Gibbs sat at his kitchen table and swilled the bourbon around and around in his glass before taking a deep mouthful. He sucked the fiery liquid through his teeth several times before he finally swallowed.
He knew it was wrong to be thankful that Tony had busted his hip but the injury solved a hell of a lot of problems. It certainly gave him some much-needed wiggle room with Vance. As far as the director was concerned the only story was that DiNozzo was out for ten weeks for rest and recuperation—doctor's orders.
Tony's badge and gun may be locked safely in Gibbs' drawer but that was as far as it went.
Nothing official, and that's how he wanted to keep it if possible.
If the director thought that the length of time off was a little excessive he didn't say. There wasn't much he could do considering it was a work-related injury, plus he couldn't argue with the detailed report from Ducky and the doctor who treated Tony at the hospital. Gibbs was proud of the collusion between the two medics. Duck had obviously argued a good case. The old Scot could be persuasive when he wanted, and the accent worked wonders. While a fractured hip wasn't pleasant by any means, ten weeks out of the office was stretching it. For all Tony's apparent slacking throughout the years he never took sick leave. He had only taken two weeks when he had the plague and then he had to be pushed into it.
Gibbs had also done a little creative reporting himself and made sure that Ziva and McGee's matched his version of events. He'd been proud of them both and their unflinching agreement to bend the truth. He knew Ziva would have no problem with lying on a report but McGee surprised him by not even blinking at the request. The anal, strictly-by-the-book boy was growing up, that's for sure. Hell, it was times like these he realized just how proud of his team he was.
After dealing with Vance, he'd called a meeting in autopsy with the whole team, Palmer and Abby included, because Duck had convinced him that they needed all hands on deck. He kept things brief and to the point. DiNozzo would need their help so they were all going to pitch in. All of them were going to make sure that they were at Tony's beck and call 24/7 for the foreseeable future whether he liked it or not.
He'd received solemn nods from everyone except Palmer, who'd looked perplexed.
The kid had started to argue that his mother had really managed just fine when she'd fallen off a chair while hanging Christmas decorations a few years ago, so a hairline fracture wouldn't be that debilitating for a young, healthy man like Tony.
It had only taken one glare and a hard arm punch from Abby to bring about a muttered but still confused agreement. Gibbs didn't want to have to spell it out. The rest of the team understood that it wasn't about helping Tony do the household chores. This was about making sure Tony didn't do something stupid and reckless when he wasn't capable of thinking rationally.
Maybe he was overreacting but right now his gut was telling him otherwise. He'd been there, he knew.
Gibbs sure as hell wasn't going to let DiNozzo sit alone in his apartment with only his thoughts for company right now, and if it took each of them to stay with him until the dark clouds lifted, then that's what they'd do.
His personal ethos was a constant in his life—you never left a man behind.
Tony pulled at the blanket that had wound tightly around his body like a python. He threw the offending item onto the floor and sat up.
He felt hot and irritable, his head throbbed and he felt hung-over. Had he had a bender last night? He couldn't remember. The fact that he was sleeping fully dressed did nothing to dispel that theory. He peered at his clock.
3 A.M.
He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept until the early hours of the morning.
It all came rushing back to him like a car wreck the moment he stood up and his hip yelled its displeasure at the sudden movement. He rubbed his forehead and silently cursed as fragments of the whiney diatribe he'd made to Ducky about his life filtered through to his bleary consciousness.
Great. Duck must have loved having to listen to that.
What the hell was wrong with him that he felt the need to share that needy shit with someone who was joined at the hip with his fucking boss— the same boss who'd just pulled his badge because he was a screw up.
Talk about giving someone enough rope.
He'd just handed Gibbs a big fat gift topped off with a nice shiny bow.
If Gibbs hadn't made a final decision about his position on the team before, he sure as hell would after he talked to Ducky.
Tony limped out of his bedroom to the bathroom. He was sure he had come home from the hospital with a set of crutches but it seemed like too much effort to find the damn things.
He filled a glass with water and drunk it down in one. He pulled open his medicine cabinet to find something to dull the pain and cursed again. The shelves were usually filled with old prescriptions from his many injuries on the job, but he'd had a 'relationship' with a nurse at the beginning of the year and she'd cleared out all his outdated medicines. Apart from a half empty bottle of cough syrup and a dented packet of Band-Aids, all he found was dust and some dental floss. He was sure there had been a couple of newish bottles of Vicodine in there that had managed to survive the cut.
He went in search of the drugs he'd been sent home with. Duck must have left them somewhere for him. As he padded into his den he almost jumped six foot in the air when a disembodied hand flopped over the top of the couch next to where he stood. He peered into the gloom and saw McGee sound asleep and snoring softly.
McGee?
What the hell was McGee doing asleep on his couch at 3 A.M. on a school night?
There was only one explanation for this unexpected and unconventional sleepover and it left a bad taste in his mouth.
He clenched his jaw and shut his eyes briefly.
Great.
So now to add insult to injury, he apparently needed a babysitter.
He saw his pain meds on the table next to McGee with two tablets neatly laid out next to a glass of water ready for his next dose.
My, wasn't Probie the little boy scout.
He reached over to scoop up the tablets and dry swallowed them, ignoring the bitterness as they stuck in his throat—but then a lot of things about this situation stuck in his throat. Obviously the general consensus was that he couldn't be trusted to sit the right way on the toilet seat without fucking up right now.
That pissed him off.
He carefully picked up McGee's jacket from its neat pile on the floor and checked the pockets.
Bingo.
Tony paused and held his breath as McGee grunted and rolled over.
He pulled out the two missing vials of Vicodine and pocketed them along with the codeine on the table.
As he made his way back to the bedroom he wondered idly what else McGee had squirreled away. He snorted to himself—he could just imagine Duck giving them all a lecture on sharp objects and fragile mental states.
Jesus, so he might have inadvertently said things last night that may have sounded dramatic but seriously, that really didn't mean he was going to off himself. Hell, he often spent many a happy hour at work fantasizing about punching the smug smile off Vance's face but that didn't mean he was actually going to do it.
Everyone went through phases in their lives where oblivion seemed attractive and they were lying if they said different.
Tony opened his closet and pulled out a jacket. The jacket had followed him from apartment to apartment for years. The actual item of clothing had changed but the sentiment behind it hadn't. Stuffed in the pockets was an envelope filled with cash. Quite a lot of cash actually, plus several fake IDs, driver's licenses, and passports from his undercover work that technically he should have handed in—but these things tended to get lost, didn't they?
Call him paranoid but when you'd infiltrated the mob a few times it paid to be a little cautious, so he always kept the jacket handy. You never knew when it might be prudent to disappear.
He stuffed some clothes into a gym bag and looked around to see if he'd missed anything.
He left his wallet and phone on the end of his bed and turned out the light.
Tony hated having to do this to McGee, but as he slipped out of the apartment he couldn't help but feel this was divine justice for all the times Tim had smugly looked down his nose at him and implied he was the better agent.
Yeah, right.
There was no way he'd have been able to jump ship if it had been Ziva asleep on his couch. She would have been alert at the first sound of movement from his bedroom. McGee may be a wiz on the ol' computer but the inbuilt instincts that every good agent should have were still practically nonexistent. McGee obviously hadn't been in the situation where sleeping so soundly was liable to get you killed.
Tony picked up one of the crutches, quietly shut the door, and walked to the elevator.
He was tired of the whole shooting match.
He wasn't even sure who he was these days.
Tony DiNozzo, ex-cop
Tony DiNozzo, federal agent—or should that be ex-federal agent?
Tony DiNozzo, Gibbs' faithful lapdog.
Tony DiNozzo, the cheerful schmuck who just bent over to let everybody shaft him time and time again.
He was done.
"Gibbs." The voice barked on the other end of the phone.
McGee felt sick.
"Um…boss, he's gone."
"What?"
Tim bit his lip, still feeling the panic race through his body when he'd walked into Tony's empty bedroom and found the closet open and several hangers scattered on the floor.
Gibbs was seriously going to kill him
"I woke up, and Tony wasn't here, boss." He swallowed hard. "I don't think….I mean…he's gone and it looks like he's taken some clothes with him."
Tim held the phone away from his ear as his boss swore loudly. Maybe now wasn't the right time to mention Tony had also taken with him the tablets he'd removed from the medicine cabinet (because he'd promised Abby he'd do it) and now had enough Vicodine on him to kill a herd of elephants.
"Get your ass back here and run a damn trace on his phone," Gibbs yelled.
"Um, boss, he left his wallet and phone behind. As far as I can see he hasn't taken any cards with him, and I've checked with all the local cab companies and no one picked up from this address and his car is still parked at the yard."
McGee wasn't sure if he was expecting at least a modicum of praise for getting the ball rolling in trying to find Tony, but Gibbs just swore once more and the line went abruptly dead in his hand.
He took one last look around the apartment. He wasn't sure why. Maybe he expected Tony to jump out from a cupboard and yell 'Surprise!' as if this was all some sort of game—but it wasn't.
It really wasn't.
McGee grabbed his bag and locked the door behind him and dragged his body down to his car, trying to put off the inevitable.
He knew was going to be persona non grata when he got back to the office. Ziva would literally want to kill him, Abby would punch the living daylights out of him, Ducky would just look at him with a patient understanding that would hurt probably a lot more than than Abby's fists ...and Gibbs would just alternate between yelling at him and ignoring him.
And the worse thing would be that, sadly, the one person who would have diluted the situation with his jokes and overt ribbing was the one person he'd managed to lose.
Abby watched as Gibbs threw his phone across her lab. It shattered into pieces as it bounced across the floor.
She walked over and silently picked up Bert, hugging him tightly to her chest.
She hated this. It had been two weeks and they still hadn't found Tony.
Gibbs started to jab his finger into Tim's chest. Ziva was waving her arms around and pacing. Everybody was yelling and talking over each other.
Abby walked away and quietly shut herself in her office, locking the door behind her, and pulled down all the blinds. She pressed play on her stereo and tried to drown out the sounds as Gibbs shouted at Timmy and Ziva. The loud frenetic sound of Gogol Bordello filled the air but it wasn't enough. She leaped up from her chair and turned the volume up as high as it would go.
The noise was deafening as the sound waves bounced off the walls of the tiny office. The glass vibrated as the bass line boomed.
She slid down onto the floor and hugged Bert tighter.
This wasn't right. They weren't supposed to be like this.
Why were they so angry with each other?
Her extended family was falling apart, and she hated it.
She could feel her throat ache and she sniffed and shut her eyes to try to stop the tears falling, but she couldn't hold them back.
She'd cried a lot the past two weeks.
She missed him.
She missed him so much.
She could feel hot fat tears snake down her face and she let them flow even though she knew she'd end up looking like Alice Cooper..
The door rattled, and someone rapped their knuckles hard on the glass.
"Abby!" Gibbs yelled over the music. "Abby, open the door."
She wiped her nose on her sleeve.
"Abs, come on. Open up."
She stood up and opened the door.
Gibbs rushed the room and turned down her music.
"I've told you all before...you've got to stop yelling at each other! How do you think that would make Tony feel to know you are all fighting over him?" She stomped her foot. "It's just not nice, Gibbs, and when Tony comes back..."
Her voice broke when she said his name, and suddenly she was in Gibbs' arms and he was gently stroking her hair.
"I'm sorry, Abs. I'm sorry." His voice was soft now. "We'll find him, I promise."
She sniffed several times and leaned into the comforting male warmth Gibbs gave off.
She wanted to believe him. She really did. Gibbs was Gibbs and he didn't make empty promises, but they had nothing. Two weeks of searching, and they were no further than they'd been fourteen days ago.
Tony had been seen hitch-hiking a mile from his apartment. They had finally managed to trace a nervous orthopedic shoe salesman who admitted that he'd picked up Tony that night and given him a ride to a rest stop out of town. Tony was last seen talking to a truck driver then ....nothing.
He hadn't used his bank account. They had no phone to trace. They'd discreetly worked their way through his little black book but not one person listed had heard from him.
He had simply vanished into thin air.
And that's what was so frustrating. Tony knew all the tricks they used to trace people and he was avoiding leaving any crumbs for them to follow.
Abby felt fresh tears fall and she grabbed at Gibbs jacket.
Why was he trying so hard not to be found?
She couldn't help but feel hurt that he hadn't made any attempt to contact her. They had always been close and they messaged and texted each other constantly, even if they'd only seen each other an hour before.
She seriously loved Tony.
He was one of the few male friends she'd never 'accidentally' slept with.
They'd come close several times throughout the years, but surprisingly it was always Tony that pulled back from the actual deed. He always joked it was his fear of getting castrated by Gibbs that always killed the moment, but she suspected it was more than that. And she actually felt quite honored to be one of the few women in Washington that he hadn't slept with…. even though she was kind of intrigued as to what it would be like.
Because they'd never danced the horizontal tango they had none of that messy awkwardness or jealousy to deal with. Timmy still got territorial over her and although it was sweet… it also drove her crazy. One drunken fumble did not count as a relationship. Tony would have understood that in a way Tim never could.
So when he'd gone missing she'd been confident he would contact her, but so far there had been silence from all methods of communication.
That scared her.
He was alone and he was hurting and had no one around him to hug him and make him see just how much they loved him.
"Find him, Gibbs. You've got to find him," she sobbed.
"I know, Abs, and I will." Gibbs whispered into her hair.
Ziva splashed her face with water and grabbed several paper towels from the dispenser. The last one stuck and she pulled hard, ripping the blue paper into tiny shreds.
Suddenly, she found herself hitting the metal casing over and over again until her hands hurt and the unit came crashing down off the wall.
She stared at the mangled dispenser at her feet and felt slightly better. The tight knots in her muscles were still there but punching the hell out of an inanimate object felt good.
She felt so useless.
She could not understand why Tony would do something like this.
For all his irritating ways he was a good friend. Someone she had grown to care for very much, even though the first time they'd met every instinct told her that he was trouble.
He was smart when he wasn't playing the fool.
He was surprisingly compassionate. She still hadn't forgotten him faking radiation poisoning and suffering through a barrage of tests just so she could spend time with a dying man.
He was also a very competent investigator when he wanted to be, but it was his undercover work that impressed her most. He kept his cool in situations that would make lesser men falter. She had seen that first hand. He would actually make a good Mossad agent—not that she would ever tell him that.
But the one thing that had always stuck her about Tony…he was strong.
She had never expected to see him fall apart. She'd seen it happen many, many times—the job they did was not easy—but she always thought Tony was immune from the stresses of the job because he never seemed to let anything get to him.
He always had a smile on his face and a smart answer ready.
And that's what she couldn't handle.
She could cope with over-confident, irritating, flirting Tony.
But she found herself drawing away from him over the past months. She knew she had to distance herself from the vulnerable man he'd become, because she wasn't sure how to handle that. She had never been good with such things and she knew she had let him down.
That's what made her so angry with herself because she knew that if the shoe had been on the other foot, Tony would have been there for her.
She stepped over the broken dispenser and squared her shoulders.
She would not let anyone know just how much she missed having Tony around.
She hated herself for getting too close.
Tony accepted the towels from the maid and gave her a smile. She never said a word to him, just nodded shyly and grabbed the dirty linen, then moved on to the next room. He shut the door and threw the towels down on his bed.
It was a joke really. He was sure the towels he'd given had actually been cleaner than the ones he'd just received, but he didn't expect much from the cheap, rent-by-the-month room in a rundown motel in a less-than-salubrious part of Leesburg.
Tony stretched back out on the bed and picked up his glass and refilled from the bottle on the floor. He drained the glass and looked around his new home. The room had probably last been decorated in the Seventies—shit brown clashed with lurid yellows and bright oranges, each color swirling into the next like a bad LSD trip.
The room smelt of stale sweat, old socks, and a curious blend of cheap perfume and disinfectant. The bathroom was dank, and the shower curtain was a giant Rorschach test picked out in mold.
The so-called air conditioning was about as useful as a hand fan cooling the Gobi desert, and every night a legion of roaches crawled out from the rusty grille and partied on every surface.
The mattress on the bed was a whole eco system in itself, and the many ominous stains would have kept Abby happily analyzing for months. In fact, the whole place looked like a crime scene. But Tony felt strangely contented. The room had become as comforting and embracing as the womb to him.
The transient nature of the place and it occupants suited him. Everyone seemed to have a story and the orca-fat, gossipy owner of the motel regaled him with a brief history of each when he'd put down what was laughingly called a security deposit. Close proximity had forced him to interact with his immediate neighbours, but on the whole they all mostly kept themselves to themselves.
In the room next to him was a guy called Bill who was convinced Jim Morrison was sending him message through his music. Tony went to sleep to the sound of 'Riders in the Storm' and often awoke to 'L.A Woman'. Apparently Bill used to be a teacher in a high school until his increasingly strange behaviour made the principal more than a little edgy and he'd been let go, leaving him with the impression that everyone in a position of authority was out to get him. The vast amounts of dope he smoked probably did nothing for his advanced state of paranoia. The smell of skunk seeping out from under his door was enough to get you high from just passing.
Next to Bill was Sandy, a careworn and buxom woman in her sixties who wore her cosmetics like war paint and 'entertained' a steady stream of men day and night.
The far side of him was Samuel, an old black guy and ex-con who'd spent the best part of his life behind bars due to a fondness for robbing convenience stores to fund his then-active drug addiction. Now he was just a tired old man who lived with his demons. He'd stop Tony when he saw him to talk about basketball and old movies but their conversations never crossed over into anything remotely personal.
Lastly on his floor there was Andrea, a thin and nervous brunette with sad eyes and a drinking habit. Her story, he'd learnt, was pretty tragic and told with all the delight of tabloid newspaper exposé by the owner of the motel. During a long and drawn-out divorce battle, her husband had taken their two kids, driven to a nearby park, then attached a hosepipe to the car, ensuring that she would never gain custody.
Andrea had turned up at Tony's door his second night with a bottle of cheap vodka. He'd been pretty much catatonic, just wanting to crash and not think or do anything, but something about the look in her eyes made him step aside and let her in. They sat and drank in silence, and the strange thing was it didn't seem unusual to him even, though it went against his whole personality to be quiet. For once it felt good not to have to fill the silence, not to have to make the effort to be witty and the life and soul of the party.
Half a bottle in, and they moved it onto the bed, pulling each other's clothes off and kissing until they were breathless. The sex had been raw and explosive but even he had been shocked when she moved on from biting and scratching to slapping and punching him, and he felt himself getting rougher and rougher with her.
But even though it shouldn't have….it felt right.
She bit until she drew blood, and her long nails raked his back and dug into his ass, making him hiss. They'd fed off each other's reactions with things getting wilder and wilder. With each thrust his hip protested. It felt like he was being stabbed with a red-hot poker repeatedly, but the added pain had felt kind of cathartic to him.
His orgasm when it had come had been explosive, and he'd collapsed onto her gasping for air. They had fallen asleep tangled in each other's arms, but when the morning came he'd found himself alone.
The following night she had turned up and they had repeated the whole experience, right down to the not talking and her leaving before the sun came up.
And each night since then they had fallen into the same routine of rough sex and flagellation.
He spent his days drinking himself into oblivion and consuming enough pain meds to make himself feel comfortably numb, eating only when his gut started to ache with the emptiness. But each night when she knocked on his door, he felt his blood pump and his heart race.
The only time he felt alive was when he was when he was having sex with her. He wasn't sure who was punishing whom. What was clear was that they were both taking their frustrations out on each other and it was all pretty broken and wrong.
But then, there was nothing about his life recently that wasn't pretty fucked up.
Tony shut his eyes and listened to the sounds of the traffic on the freeway. He could hear Bill in the next room shuffling around talking to himself.
He felt like he'd found his spiritual home. For once he didn't feel like he was the biggest screw up. They were all pretty much on a par with each other.
He picked up the bottle and refilled his glass again.
It actually felt good for a change not to have to live up to anyone's expectations.
TBC
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